


Five Years Ago, Three Thousand Miles Away

by SBG



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Angst, Future Fic, M/M, Unhappy Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-20
Updated: 2012-09-20
Packaged: 2017-11-14 16:43:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/517413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SBG/pseuds/SBG
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Danny, a few years into a future that didn't see him winning the custody modifications, reliving a moment in his former life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Years Ago, Three Thousand Miles Away

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to LdyAnne for the first read! Sorry this one isn't gonna continue for you. I wanted a happy ending, but... ;)
> 
> Also to note: the fic title and the overall feel of this fic come from Elbow's song _The Bones of You_ and I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that.

The bullpen buzzed with movement. It always seemed to, whether or not he was an active participant, no matter the time of day. The air was charged with urgency, of too many crimes committed and too few resources to deal with them all, and the underlying stress of everyone knowing it. Detective Lieutenant Danny Williams slapped his hand on top of the completed report from a case they _had_ managed to solve, even if it felt like too little, too late. He slid it away, flipped it to the finished paperwork pile. The smell of the busy room was an amalgamation of sweat and booze from perps and informants alike, the remains of coffee left too long on the pot and stale cologne intended to mask the number of hours spent on the job. 

He was tired. Today especially because cases involving kids Grace’s age or, god, even younger, had eaten at him long before he became a father, exhausted him to the soul the older his own child got. But his tiredness was a part of him now, and it never went away so much as was modulated based on daily events. It was a symptom of age catching up with him, he thought. After all, he was pushing forty now, with a slight paunch he fucking hated but was too tired to combat and a hairline too receded to call a high forehead. Age made a person tired, of course it did, though deep down Danny knew it wasn’t a simple matter of nature. Forty wasn’t old; it was the number of things he’d seen in his career that made it seem as if he’d lived beyond that. He scratched at the belly that was softer than it had been last year, the year before that, every year since he’d come here.

“Williams, you look rougher than a showgirl when she takes off her makeup and lets her five o’clock shadow see the light of day,” O’Rourke said, Danny’s occasional, infrequent partner.

They’d been on this one together out of necessity, him and O’Rourke and a handful of others. A beautiful, sweet girl found dead had quickly gone from a murder investigation to a broader trafficking ring that made Danny sick to his heart and his stomach, but he hadn’t been able to let it go to detectives more suited to the crime. The case had eaten into the few off minutes he’d had for the last month, robbed him of sleep and appetite. Knowing that the sale of children had gone on for years made him ill, the skin of the victims too pigmented for anyone to notice something was very, very wrong. Well, Danny had noticed. 

In the end they’d saved five children, babies really, and there remained too great a number they might never know had been lost.

“Fuck you, O’Rourke. Didn’t your momma ever teach you that if you don’t have anything nice to say, then don’t say anything at all?” Danny said, sounding more bitter than he’d actually meant. Sleep deprivation was a pisser on his ability to monitor his tongue and tone. 

O’Rourke, with a belly far softer than Danny’s _ever_ would be and hair that was more white than sandy brown, waved a hand in Danny’s direction. He was a dinosaur here, well established and a good detective. Annoying as hell, sometimes, a trait overlooked by many due to his solve rate and seniority.

“Jesus, kid, I only meant go home already like the rest of us. Get some sleep. God knows we deserve a little peace, huh?” O’Rourke ran a hand through his hair, which somehow made him look older, wearier. “Go see your kid, maybe, before you drag your sorry ass back in here again.”

He worked alone these days. Danny had earned that, he was proud of it in some respects. But in this city, this bustling monstrosity in the middle of the desert where the crime scene crew seemed to have an inflated sense of self-importance, most of the time working cases on his own only solidified his loneliness. He didn’t like to think about that. Turned out, he didn’t like to think about much other than solving the cases assigned, and Grace. 

It was an existence, but he wasn’t sure it was a life.

“Yeah,” he said at last. “Maybe.” 

Danny shrugged and got to his feet. He stretched out his arms, grimaced at the way his right shoulder popped when he reached for his jacket. He folded the unneeded garment – fucking desert – over his forearm, nodded good night to O’Rourke and headed out of the station. Annoying or not, O’Rourke made a valid point about earning some peace. 

“See you around, kid,” O’Rourke said.

“Night,” Danny mumbled, though he couldn’t remember if the sun had actually set.

Yes, he needed sleep. But no way in hell was Danny going to let Grace see him until he had his head back on straight. His little girl wasn’t so little anymore, and while she might have been sweetly naïve in her pre-teen years, she’d never been stupid. Everything that had happened in her short life – being uprooted twice, kidnapped, fought over like she was the damned flag in a game of Tug-O-War – she was brighter now than ever, especially when it came to seeing beneath the surface of people, a deep intuition. He hoped that of the traits she’d picked up from him, that one would steer her into a decent career path, something as far away from law enforcement as possible. For as much as he enjoyed his work, he did not want a child of his to feel as he did at this moment, sick to the very core.

So, seeing Grace would wait. She’d pick up on his residual horror and Danny wouldn’t add detail to the news reports she’d undoubtedly already seen. The older she got, the more Danny was aware of how the turmoil of his job bled into his daily life, and how much it impacted her. Besides concern for her emotional wellbeing, there was always that custody and visitations were different now that she was older, anyway. Grace probably wouldn’t care if she saw him anytime soon.

They’d both changed over the years. The second battle for custody had ripped something from both of their spirits, and Danny regretted his part in it more than just about anything else in his life. He’d honestly thought he could win and had fought accordingly. The ugliness had turned out to be futile in the end and he had relearned a valuable lesson: money and status would always, always trump everything else. The judge had even looked embarrassed to have to tell Danny to pack his bags if he wanted to see his kid. To Danny, it had the effect of kicking his legs out from under him. 

That time, though, the lesson stuck. _You don’t get to fight for yourself, Williams,_ a little voice reminded him constantly, _you’ll only make it worse._ Danny closed his eyes at the memories, not sure why he was dredging it up. Maybe it was little Sofia Velasquez, whose parents missed her every day but couldn’t come forward to report her missing without being deported themselves. He wondered if there was a parallel to his own life there, a convoluted, unreasonable parallel. He knew one thing: if he couldn’t fight for himself, he’d sure as shit fight for others, and that definitely included little girls and boys taken and sold, raped and murdered.

Danny shook his head. What he needed was a strong drink and about a hundred hours of dreamless sleep. The former he could do something about, which in turn might coax the latter along. It was a plan. A stupid, slippery-sloped plan and one he’d employed too often lately. He told himself that by going to a known cop bar, he wasn’t drinking alone. He told himself without the booze, he’d dream dreams he couldn’t handle. The car practically navigated itself.

The crowd at Mr. D’s on South Rainbow was filled with familiar and strange faces both, already busy though the sun had only been setting as he’d left the station. This was Vegas. Time of day was immaterial to the flow of alcohol and the number of people needing to celebrate something, forget something or drown something. Lucky Danny, he hit the proverbial jackpot and needed all three. He’d have one drink for each something, that was all. 

He pulled up a stool at the bar, in the corner and relatively isolated. He wasn’t alone, but he was absolutely alone. He gave a nod to the bartender he recognized but couldn’t quite remember a name to go with the face. Didn’t matter. The bartender knew him too, or at least knew his tells, and poured him a healthy double Scotch, neat. Danny stared down at the dark amber liquid, which rippled as he circled the glass against the bar. All of a sudden, he saw Sofia Velasquez, the puddle of muddy blood she’d lain in, a portrait of still death he’d revisited too often through the duration of the case, a reminder.

Danny didn’t take a drink. He closed his eyes and engaged in the infrequent fantasy of his that he was home, until he could hear the gentle, continuous glide of waves on sand. He didn’t know when something had switched inside him, made him not think of New Jersey in these little mental escapes, but some isolated cluster of rocks in the middle of the Pacific. To tell the truth, he didn’t often think of home one way or another, except to know that despite Grace’s presence here, this would never feel right to him. Things he’d thought he’d wanted while he was in Hawai’i he could have in Las Vegas and it had taken him inside of a week to find that ties he’d only gotten used to not wearing were too constricting and the desert air wreaked more havoc on his sinuses than the damp clime of the islands ever had. 

Fifty-some months later, he still didn’t call this his home.

It was what it was. Danny couldn’t change things and his wants were, in the grand scheme, irrelevant. Lesson learned and all. He never concentrated the fantasy beyond the general. That was too depressing, dangerous. He opened his eyes, stared down at the drink for a fraction of a second before he lifted the glass and tipped back two controlled swallows. The sound of the ocean remained in his ears, the taste of sea salt somehow in his mouth. He finished the drink, washed the imaginary sensations away. He had every reason to be maudlin. He tapped the bar, got another wordless filling of his glass.

He didn’t focus his attention on any one thing. The TVs showed a baseball game he had no interest in. The woman next to him looked as isolated as he felt. The rest of the crowd was large but not overly loud, the din of chatter and laughs a dull hum under the beat of music. A song began to play that had Danny’s ears ring, made his world shift into a slow, strange pace that didn’t match everything around him, and was a direct counterpoint to the strength of the song. He’d heard it a hundred times before; it was a classic. But for some reason, slouching there nursing a drink, hearing the chords took him out of where he was and dropped him years ago, thousands of miles away.

_The morning sun lit the room, a hazy pinkish orange through his eyelids. It pulled him awake with the kind of dreamy finesse that was cliché but beautiful, lazy, made the day Sunday no matter what the calendar said. Danny refused to open his eyes, shifted only slightly to press himself deeper into the mattress, careful of the arm cradling the neck of the man next to him. Steve moved then, just a soft twitch of leg, nose turning into Danny’s shoulder, but by the deepness of his breaths Danny could tell he didn’t wake._

_He turned his head, opened his eyes. The light was golden now, hit every plane of Steve’s face, his arms. Danny’s gaze landed and stuck on Steve’s eyelashes, stupidly long and beautiful as they cast tiny shadows. He and Steve had slept together off and on, mostly on, for a long time. What it was, was fucking, releasing the sexual tension and regular life tension in a mutually beneficial means of eliminating stress. This felt … this was different, right here and now, he thought maybe. He tried not to think, it was a bad idea, tried to go back to sleep, which was a better idea. He closed his eyes, listened to the waves that had stopped bothering him the second time he’d stayed the night, here in this room. He tasted Steve on his lips, sweat and ocean and he couldn’t say what else. Just Steve. He wanted to sleep all day, wanted both of them to spend hours lazing and doing nothing but enjoying each other. A stab of total embarrassment hit him for sentimentalizing this._

_He opened his eyes, stared at the ceiling and remained still and quiet. The weight of Steve’s arm across his middle, left leg atop of his, burrowed between his legs, the slight scrape of callused feet and toenails seemed somehow too real. Too much like everything he needed and wanted in one package and it was not how he’d imagined it was going to be. He hadn’t pegged Steve for a snuggler, but that had started several weeks ago and Danny liked these moments more than he would say. He thought maybe that was when it had started changing for him, the sex getting confused and muddled with the friendship and affection he’d always had for Steve and all of his flaws. Steve’s foot moved, toe poking at his leg. Danny looked down, found Steve staring at him, eyes bright and big._

_“Hey, morning,” Danny mumbled, voice sleep hoarse and thick even with two words._

_“Morning,” Steve said, lips pressed into Danny’s skin. He scraped his teeth along Danny’s bicep, gentle, tongue flicking out just a little. “Hey.”_

_As far as pillow talk went, it was ridiculous. Danny had come to expect nothing less, and he smiled crookedly at the way Steve’s hand shifted to rest low on his stomach and rubbed a slow, widening circle._

_“If you start me up,” Danny said._

_He gasped the last word and forgot entirely what he’d meant to finish with as Steve circled his hand all the way down to Danny’s cock and barely ghosted his fingertips over it. Danny shifted his legs, twisted his hip, nonverbal agreement and yes, please. Steve wrapped his strong hand around Danny firmly then. Steve raised himself on his elbow and nuzzled at Danny’s neck with his nose, the scrape of skin against stubble loud in the quiet room. Instead of kissing or stroking or fucking, Steve pulled back and grinned._

_“You got to never stop, never stop, never, never, never,” Steve said, half-singing. He took a breath, winked and sang in earnest, “You make a grown man cry.”_

_Danny blinked as Steve kept on singing, belting out lyric after lyric, and he didn’t have a bad voice, but it was so fucking surreal. He was … Steve had lost it, serenading him or whatever, with his hand still on Danny’s cock as he did a fair Mick Jagger impression. A swirl of amusement hit him right in time with his arousal. He wasn’t sure if he could keep from laughing if Steve finished the whole damn song. He reached and covered Steve’s mouth with his hand, arched slightly._

_“God, I love you,” Danny said, instead of the ‘shut up, you giant dork’ that really should have come out of his mouth._

_Steve went absolutely still, hand on his cock just cradling him and mouth going slack beneath Danny’s palm. His eyes widened, looked like deep pools in the indistinct light and Danny closed his own to avoid seeing what he knew would replace the startled look. He shouldn’t have said that. Jesus. He felt the bed jostle as Steve shifted, heard the rustle of the sheet and the strong grasp of Steve’s hand on his wrist, prying away Danny’s fingers from across his mouth. A soft kiss was placed at the base of his hand, before Steve intertwined their fingers and pushed their joined hands into the pillow next to Danny’s head._

_“Danny,” Steve said. “Look at me.”_

_Danny felt like an idiot, but he did and saw no amusement or alarm or rejection in Steve’s expression. It was a new face looking back at him. Steve shifted again, lay halfway on top of him and let go of his dick. Steve kissed him then, without tongue until Danny’s muscles lost some of their tautness and he responded just like he always did. Steve lined their cocks up and moved against him in a tender rhythm as they kissed and kissed, Danny’s hand squeezing Steve’s. There was no sense of urgency, no burning need to get off fast and hard. This was relaxed, a good morning and hello and Danny knew what this was most of all. It was the promise of a lifetime more of this, love reciprocated. He let the sensations flow over him._

Danny couldn’t keep the bittersweet smile from his face, knew it was grotesque by the way the bartender eyed him like he might lose his shit all of a sudden. The Stones had switched into some disgusting Auto-Tuned club song, but the skeleton of a better time remained, the artifacts of Steve in his life that he could never quite escape. Never in a million years had he thought when he’d met Steve McGarrett that they would become a _could have been_. Never in a million years, either, would he regret what they’d managed to claim as their own, no matter how brief the time they’d had before everything went to forty kinds of hell. In his head, sometimes, yes, he wondered what his life might have been like now, if only.

But of course Danny had to choose Grace, and of course Steve had to remain where he was, vendettas morphed and changed and still as much a part of him as his resurrected mother had been. Danny wasn’t angry, not anymore. Neither he nor Steve had been able to maintain happiness in other parts of their lives. Them as a _them_ could have only ever been more of the same.

Danny thought he’d dismantled all of these mental souvenirs, stored the pieces where they couldn’t get at him. The stars had aligned properly or whatever, with the right combination of weariness and heartache and distress that had brought this back to mind. He was okay. He was okay missing something he’d never really had, resigned to it. There were very few people who got what they wanted in this shitty world, but for that golden time with Steve, he’d had what he needed. He couldn’t look at that as a bad thing, not entirely, even as he ached with the loss now.

He opened his wallet, fished out enough money for the drinks and a healthy tip. His hands felt a tad shaky. As he left the bar for what was home in name only, Danny tasted sweat and ocean and Steve on lips numb from Scotch and memories.


End file.
